A Book of Burlesques by H. L. Mencken (ebook reader color screen .txt) 📗

that great and good man. But by a powerful effort of the will—or, should I say, by a sudden access of grace?—I recovered and pushed her from me. And then, closing my eyes to shut out the image of her, I pronounced those solemn and awful words: “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord!” The effect was immediate: she emitted a moan and departed. I had resisted her abhorrent blandishments. (Proverbs I, 10.)

January 25.

I love the Book of Job. Where else in the Scriptures is there a more striking picture of the fate that overtakes those who yield to sin? “They meet with darkness in the day-time, and grope in the noon-day as in the night” (Job V, 14). And further on: “They grope in the dark without light, and he maketh them to stagger like a drunken man” (Job XII, 25). I read these beautiful passages over and over again. They comfort me.

January 28.

That shameless person once more. She sends back the tracts I gave her—torn in halves.

February 3.[143]

That American brother, the former Dunkard, thrilled us with his eloquence at to-night’s meeting. In all my days I have heard no more affecting plea for right living. In words that almost seemed to be of fire he set forth the duty of all of us to combat sin wherever we find it, and to scourge the sinner until he foregoes his folly.

“It is not sufficient,” he said, “that we keep our own hearts pure: we must also purge the heart of our brother. And if he resist us, let no false sympathy for him stay our hands. We are charged with the care and oversight of his soul. He is in our keeping. Let us seek at first to save him with gentleness, but if he draws back, let us unsheath the sword! We must be deaf to his protests. We must not be deceived by his casuistries. If he clings to his sinning, he must perish.”

Cries of “Amen!” arose spontaneously from the little band of consecrated workers. I have never heard a more triumphant call to that Service which is the very heart’s blood of righteousness. Who could listen to it, and then stay his hand?

I looked for that scarlet creature. She was not there.

February 7.[144]

I have seen her again. She came, I thought, in all humility. I received her gently, quoting aloud the beautiful words of Paul in Colossians III, 12: “Put on therefore, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, long-suffering.” And then I addressed her in calm, encouraging tones: “Are you ready, woman, to put away your evil-doing, and forswear your carnalities forevermore? Have you repented of your black and terrible sin? Do you ask for mercy? Have you come in sackcloth and ashes?”

The effect, alas, was not what I planned. Instead of yielding to my entreaty and casting herself down for forgiveness, she yielded to her pride and mocked me! And then, her heart still full of the evils of the flesh, she tried to tempt me! She approached me. She lifted up her face to mine. She smiled at me with abominable suggestiveness. She touched me with her garment. She laid her hand upon my arm.... I felt my resolution going from me. I was as one stricken with the palsy. My tongue clave to the roof of my mouth. My hands trembled. I tried to push her from me and could not....

February 10.[145]

In all humility of spirit I set it down. The words burn the paper; the fact haunts me like an evil dream. I yielded to that soulless and abominable creature. I kissed her.... And then she laughed, making a mock of me in my weakness, burning me with the hot iron of her scorn, piercing my heart with the daggers of her reviling. Laughed, and slapped my face! Laughed, and spat in my eye! Laughed, and called me a hypocrite!...

They have taken her away. Let her taste the fire! Let her sin receive its meet and inexorable punishment! Let righteousness prevail! Let her go with “the fearful and unbelieving, the abominable and murderers, the white-slave traders and sorcerers.” Off with her to that lake “which burneth with fire and brimstone!” (Revelation XXI, 8.)....

Go, Jezebel! Go, Athaliah! Go, Painted One! Thy sins have found thee out.

February 11.

I spoke myself at to-night’s meeting—simple words, but I think their message was not lost. We must wage forever the good fight. We must rout the army of sin from its fortresses....

[147]

VIII.—LITANIES FOR THE OVERLOOKED
VIII.—Litanies for the Overlooked

[149]

I.—For Americanos

From scented hotel soap, and from the Boy Scouts; from home cooking, and from pianos with mandolin attachments; from prohibition, and from Odd Fellows’ funerals; from Key West cigars, and from cold dinner plates; from transcendentalism, and from the New Freedom; from fat women in straight-front corsets, and from Philadelphia cream cheese; from The Star-Spangled Banner, and from the International Sunday-school Lessons; from rubber heels, and from the college spirit; from sulphate of quinine, and from Boston baked beans; from chivalry, and from laparotomy; from the dithyrambs of Herbert Kaufman, and from sport in all its hideous forms; from women with pointed fingernails, and from men with messianic delusions; from the retailers of smutty anecdotes about the Jews, and from the Lake Mohonk [150]Conference; from Congressmen, vice crusaders, and the heresies of Henry Van Dyke; from jokes in the Ladies’ Home Journal, and from the Revised Statutes of the United States; from Colonial Dames, and from men who boast that they take cold shower-baths every morning; from the Drama League, and from malicious animal magnetism; from ham and eggs, and from the Weltanschauung of Kansas; from the theory that a dark cigar is always a strong one, and from the theory that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake; from campaigns against profanity, and from the Pentateuch; from anti-vivisection, and from women who do not smoke; from wine-openers, and from Methodists; from Armageddon, and from the belief that a bloodhound never makes a mistake; from sarcerdotal moving-pictures, and from virtuous chorus girls; from bungalows, and from cornets in B flat; from canned soups, and from women who leave everything to one’s honor; from detachable cuffs, and from Lohengrin; from unwilling motherhood, and from canary birds—good Lord, deliver us!

II.—For Hypochondriacs

From adenoids, and from chronic desquamative nephritis; from Shiga’s bacillus, and from [151]hysterotrachelorrhaphy; from mitral insufficiency, and from Cheyne-Stokes breathing; from the streptococcus pyogenes, and from splanchnoptosis; from warts, wens, and the spirochæte pallida; from exophthalmic goitre, and from septicopyemia; from poisoning by sewer-gas, and from the bacillus coli communis; from anthrax, and from von Recklinghausen’s disease; from recurrent paralysis of the laryngeal nerve, and from pityriasis versicolor; from mania-à-potu, and from nephrorrhaphy; from the leptothrix, and from colds in the head; from tape-worms, from jiggers and from scurvy; from endocarditis, and from Romberg’s masticatory spasm; from hypertrophic stenosis of the pylorus, and from fits; from the bacillus botulinus, and from salaam convulsions; from cerebral monoplegia, and from morphinism; from anaphylaxis, and from neuralgia in the eyeball; from dropsy, and from dum-dum fever; from autumnal catarrh, from coryza vasomotoria, from idiosyncratic coryza, from pollen catarrh, from rhinitis sympathetica, from rose cold, from catarrhus æstivus, from periodic hyperesthetic rhinitis, from heuasthma, from catarrhe d’ été and from hay-fever—good Lord, deliver us!

[152]

III.—For Music Lovers

From all piano-players save Paderewski, Godowski and Mark Hambourg; and from the William Tell and 1812 overtures; and from bad imitations of Victor Herbert by Victor Herbert; and from persons who express astonishment that Dr. Karl Muck, being a German, is devoid of all bulge, corporation, paunch or leap-tick; and from the saxophone, the piccolo, the cornet and the bagpipes; and from the theory that America has no folk-music; and from all symphonic poems by English composers; and from the tall, willing, horse-chested, ham-handed, quasi-gifted ladies who stagger to their legs in gloomy drawing rooms after bad dinners and poison the air with Tosti’s Good-bye; and from the low prehensile, godless laryngologists who prostitute their art to the saving of tenors who are happily threatened with loss of voice; and from clarinet cadenzas more than two inches in length; and from the first two acts of Il Trovatore; and from such fluffy, xanthous whiskers as Lohengrins wear; and from sentimental old maids who sink into senility lamenting that Brahms never wrote an opera; and from programme music, with or without notes; and from Swiss bell-ringers, Vincent [153]D’Indy, the Paris Opera, and Elgar’s Salut d’Amour; and from the doctrine that Massenet was a greater composer than Dvorák; and from Italian bands and Schnellpostdoppelschraubendampfer orchestras; and from Raff’s Cavatina and all of Tschaikowsky except ten per centum; and from prima donna conductors who change their programmes without notice, and so get all the musical critics into a sweat; and from the abandoned hussies who sue tenors for breach of promise; and from all alleged musicians who do not shrivel to the size of five-cent cigars whenever they think of old Josef Haydn—good Lord, deliver us!

IV.—For Hangmen

From clients who delay the exercises by pausing to make long and irrelevant speeches from the scaffold, or to sing depressing Methodist hymns; and from medical examiners who forget their stethoscopes, and clamor for waits while messenger boys are sent for them; and from official witnesses who faint at the last minute, and have to be hauled out by the deputy sheriffs; and from undertakers who keep looking at their watches and hinting obscenely that they have other engagements at 10:30; and [154]from spiritual advisers who crowd up at the last minute and fall through the trap with the condemned—good Lord, deliver us!

V.—For Magazine Editors

From Old Subscribers who write in to say that the current number is the worst magazine printed since the days of the New York Galaxy; and from elderly poetesses who have read all the popular text-books of sex hygiene, and believe all the bosh in them about the white slave trade, and so suspect the editor, and even the publisher, of sinister designs; and from stories in which a rising young district attorney gets the dead wood upon a burly political boss named Terrence O’Flaherty, and then falls in love with Mignon, his daughter, and has to let him go; and from stories in which a married lady, just about to sail for Capri with her husband’s old Corpsbruder, is dissuaded from her purpose by the news that her husband has lost $700,000 in Wall Street and is on his way home to weep on her shoulder; and from one-act plays in which young Cornelius Van Suydam comes home from The Club at 11:55 P. M. on Christmas Eve, dismisses Dodson, his Man, with the compliments of the season, and draws [155]up his chair before the open fire to dream of his girl, thus preparing the way for the entrance of Maxwell, the starving burglar, and for the scene in which Maxwell’s little daughter, Fifi, following him up the fire-escape, pleads with him to give up his evil courses; and from poems about war in which it is argued that thousands of young men are always killed, and that their mothers regret to hear of it; and from essays of a sweet and whimsical character, in which the author refers to himself as “we,” and ends by quoting Bergson, Washington Irving or Agnes Repplier; and from epigrams based on puns, good or bad; and from stories beginning, “It was the autumn of the year 1950”; and from stories embodying quotations from Omar Khayyam, and full of a mellow pessimism; and from stories in which the gay nocturnal life of the Latin Quarter is described by an author living in Dubuque, Iowa; and from stories of thought transference, mental healing and haunted houses; and from newspaper stories in which a cub reporter solves the mystery of the Snodgrass murder and is promoted to dramatic critic on the field, or in which a city editor who smokes a corn-cob pipe falls in love with a sob-sister; and from stories about trained nurses, young dramatists, baseball players, [156]heroic locomotive engineers, settlement workers, clergymen, yeggmen, cowboys, Italians, employés of the Hudson Bay Company and great detectives; and from stories in which the dissolute son of a department store owner tries to seduce a working girl in his father’s employ and then goes on the water wagon and marries her as a tribute to her virtue; and from stories in which the members of a yachting party are wrecked on a desert island in the South Pacific, and the niece of the owner of the yacht falls in love with the bo’sun; and from manuscripts accompanied by documents certifying that the incidents and people described are real, though cleverly disguised; and from authors who send in saucy notes when their offerings are returned with insincere thanks; and from lady authors who appear with satirical letters of introduction from the low, raffish rogues who edit rival magazines—good Lord, deliver us!

[157]

IX.—ASEPSIS
IX.—Asepsis. A Deduction in Scherzo Form

[159]

Characters:

A Clergyman A Bride Four Bridesmaids A Bridegroom A Best Man The Usual Crowd

Place—The surgical amphitheatre in a hospital.

Time—Noon of a fair day.

Seats rising in curved tiers. The operating pit paved with white tiles. The usual operating table has been